Hi All, Recently I was evaluating BEA?s Portal v9.2 and - of course ? Apache Beehive as part of it. During the investigation I?ve run into several serious issues I would like to discuss on the list. I don?t want to jump to unfair conclusions in my closing report? maybe I?ve missed something? So, I would be really grateful for any feedback regarding the issues described below:
1) Inconsistent navigation model. From what I could understand, you can navigate from a method action only by going through forwards (either method-level or global ones). You do this navigation by specifying a logical ?event name? (forward name). On the other hand, in JSP (?view node?) you are free to call any action, even the one not intended by a flow designer! In fact, this is possible, because in JSP you do specify an action name not a logical event name! What it effectively means is that you can?t express a restriction like ?from this JSP (presentation node) you can only call certain actions?. I can?t find an equivalent of forwards on the JSP level. Because of this, Beehive seams to capture only half of a logical web flow, and should be placed somewhere between ?simple? web frameworks (Struts, WebWork) and ?real? web flow libraries (Spring Web Flow). Am I right or missing sth obvious? What I would like to see is sth like forwards for simple (annotation) actions, and different set of taglibs, where you specify a forward name, not an action name. 2) Taglib - links to other flows ? I couldn?t find a JSP tag that would allow me to create links to other web flow controllers. This is because I use an action name while constructing a link, without a controller name! Of course I could create a link manually, but it would mean hard-coding a link pattern in JSPs, and this should be responsibility of taglib. 3) Taglib ? different field names and Java Script ? it seams that Beehive taglibs used to create form fields, do add a prefix to a generated HTML form field name. Worse yet, those prefixes are different in a stand-alone and portal environment. Unpredictable field names make it very difficult to add sophisticated JavaScript? 4) Flow inheritance ? at first it seemed like a wonderful feature, but in practice it turned out to be almost useless, since some annotations (method forwards) are not inherited from a parent class. What I would like to see is kind of merging for forwards ? or at least a way to specify, if I want method forwards to be overridden or merged in a child class. I asked about this in a separate thread (post from Thu, 08 Jun, 14:27), but got no response?. Please, help me with the evaluation of Beehive. I would like to propose this solution, as it is very well integrated with BEA portal. Unfortunately, because of identified issues I can?t recommend using Beehive. I hope I?ve missed some obvious solution / work-around for problems just described. Best regards, Pawel Kozlowski
